Page 20 of Honeyfires

"I have a question."

"Yes, I remember."

"I've been thinking about asking it since five this morning."

Her lips parted slightly. "That's—very early."

"I'm an early riser."

"You are," she said softly, "also extremely annoying."

"Can I kiss you?"

I watched it happen, the way the question landed in her, moved through her, settled somewhere that made her exhale slow and close her eyes for exactly one second.

Then she opened her eyes and grabbed my jacket lapels with both hands, and pulled.

I went.

I braced my forearm on the shelf above her head so the whole Le Guin section didn't come down on us, and pressed my mouth to hers, and this was—

This was the first kiss I'd meant to give her. Soft. Careful. Preliminary. The kind that knocks once before asking if it can come in.

She had absolutely no interest in preliminary.

She made a small sound against my lips, urgent and entirely unselfconscious, and pulled me closer by the lapels, and whatever careful intention I'd arrived with dissolved like pink and blue cotton candy in warm summer rain. Her lips parted against mine. I tasted coffee and the ghost of something warm and spiced, like cinnamon mints, and the low, insistent heat of wanting her rolled through me like a pressure front. Like the moment before a wind shift, when you feel it before you can name it, the air changing character, everything about to move differently.

I kissed her properly. Thoroughly. My hand found her waist through the soft fabric of her dress, my thumb tracing the curve of it, and she arched into me slightly, her small body finding mine like she'd done the math on this already. The shelf behind her shifted faintly with the weight of us both.

When I grazed her lower lip with my teeth, she made a sound—brief, involuntary, swallowed almost immediately, like she'd tried to hold it and couldn't—and heat shot straight to my pulse points. Her fingers tightened on my jacket. Her nails found the edge of my collarbone. The man with the periodical three rows over had long ceased to be a concern I was capable of holding.

I pulled back. Just enough to look at her.

She looked like someone had rearranged her. Lipstick migrated. A lock of hair escaping the chignon and curling against her cheek. Chest rising and falling like she'd been somewhere far away and was only now returning. Her eyes were dark and marveling and fixed on my face with an expression that had no production left in it at all.

We were both breathing like we'd forgotten how.

"Oh," said Vera.

"Yeah," I said.

"That was—"

"Yeah."

She blinked, very slowly. "I had a whole list of things I was going to say after that."

"What happened to the list?"

"You happened to the list." She looked up at me with enormous eyes and the ruins of her lipstick. "The list is gone, Petra. The list is simply gone."

I laughed, which was not how I'd expected to feel thirty seconds after kissing someone for the first time, and also exactly right. "Do you need a moment to rebuild it?"

"I need several moments." She reached up and tried to wipe the lipstick from my mouth with her thumb, which was an optimistic effort given that her hands weren't entirely steady. "Hold still."

"You're smearing it."

"I'm fixing it."